Benedetto Lupo

Pianist Benedetto Lupo made his Vancouver recital debut yesterday (he had previously appeared with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra) in a daring programme of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. I say daring because even though both composers are often audience’s favourites, the works Mr. Lupo programmed could hardly have qualified as crowd pleasers.

Towards the end of his life, Johannes Brahms wrote four sets of short piano pieces. For me, these pieces are really a distillation and culmination of Brahms‘s entire career as a composer.  For me, these are some of the most intimate pieces of music Brahms ever wrote, and even a great Brahms pianist like Arthur Rubinstein, who made beautiful recordings of this music, avoided playing them in recitals. Benedetto Lupo certainly set himself a challenge when he programmed both the three pieces in Op. 117 and the seven pieces in Op. 116 in the first half of his recital programme.

On top of the varying technical challenges in each of the pieces, there is, in the piano music of Brahms, a fine balance between the horizontal and the vertical aspects of the music. In addition to moving the music forward, the artist must bring clarity to the multi-layered texture of the score. As conductor and pianist André Previn said, there is, in Brahms, always a beautiful melody struggling to get out.

Lupo lavished each of these pieces with a beautiful sound at the piano, and exhibited a fine sense of direction in the music. He managed to highlight the many layers within the music, while never making the music sound heavy or lacking in forward motion. The near-capacity audience rewarded the pianist with the greatest gift a musician could ask for – silence.

I was very grateful for Benedetto Lupo, both for programming Tchaikovsky’s Grand Piano Sonata in G Major, Op. 37, and for speaking to the audience before the performance. While I know of the work’s existence, as well as of recordings by pianists such as Richter, I was hearing the work for the first time yesterday. Lupo pointed out that the sonata was written at about the same time as the composer’s fourth symphony, and therefore the element of fate plays a large part in both works, thus, in the pianist’s own words,  the “obsessiveness” in many of the themes. He also shared with the audience the observation that the beautiful second subject in the first movement is actually based on the Dies Irae, from the Catholic Latin Mass for the Dead.

From the march-like first subject in the first movement, to the ferociously difficult final movement, the sonata could not have found a greater champion than Lupo. Under the wrong hands, this work can sound like repetitive and meandering. The young pianist played the entire work with an incredible sense of purpose and unity, and with an utter neglect for the fearsome pianistic challenges lay down by the composer. Under his hands, the logic as well as originality of this unfamiliar (to me) work by a very familiar composer became quite apparent.

In this already crowded field of outstanding pianists, Benedetto Lupo is an artist that has much to offer, and one that I would love to hear again. Lupo’s programme reminded me once again the vastness of the piano literature, and that there are still relatively unknown masterpieces in the pianistic canon waiting for both artists and audience to discover.

Revisiting Schnabel's Beethoven

I finished listening to Artur Schnabel’s recording of Beethoven’s thirty two piano sonatas. No, it was not some macho thing where I did it in one sitting. Over the last few weeks, I have been listening to one or two sonatas a day, and the experience has a revelation.

Today, when there are dozens of complete recordings of these iconic works and with pianists rushing to recording them once they reached their 18^th birthday, it is difficult to imagine the significance and impact those first recordings had.

In Harold Schonberg’s entertaining (but not always accurate) book, The Great Pianists, the writer devoted an entire chapter to Artur Schnabel (even Arthur Rubinstein had to share a chapter with his archrival and sometime friend Vladimir Horowitz), and entitled it “The Man Who Invented Beethoven.”

It took Schnabel several years, from 1931 to 1935, to record all the sonatas.  Listening to them again today, the performances are, to me, just as valid, moving and, for lack of a better word, right. I once heard the comment that piano playing today has become either anonymous or idiosyncratic. Schnabel’s playing is neither. And hearing these recordings remind me how standardized, even generic, music making has become today.

Unlike other Beethoven “specialists” of his time, pianists like Wilhelm Backhaus, Rudolf Serkin, and Wilhelm Kempff, to name just a few, pianists who carry the torch of the Germanic tradition of piano playing, Schnabel never hesitated to take chances in his playing. In many of the faster movements, Schnabel played with an absolute feeling of reckless abandon, making the performance extremely thrilling. Don’t get me wrong, Schnabel was very much interested in the details, as well as the structural integrity of the music, but he was not an artist who saw only the trees and not the forest. It is music-making that was, and is, spontaneous and very much alive. Hearing these performances, I couldn’t help but feel that Beethoven himself must have played in a similar way.

Schnabel’s Beethoven recordings were made in the days when editing was not possible, and much has been made of Schnabel’s many wrong notes in his recordings (and in his live performances as well). Schnabel had as remarkable a technique as any of his colleagues, then and now, but he was simply not interested in merely playing all the correct notes.

Note-perfect performances, a norm in our times, can be detrimental to the recreation of great music. Pianist Murray Perahia reminds us that perfection is not only an impossible but dangerous pursuit.

In Arthur Rubinstein’s memoirs, My Many Years, the pianist was quite dismissive of Schnabel’s playing. This is unfortunate, because there are remarkable similarities between the playing of these two great artists – the same generous, unforced tone at the piano, and a remarkably similar approach to the score. It is interesting to note that the recordings of Rubinstein, the Romantic pianist par-excellence, sounds more restrained, even careful, and more “Classical”, in his Beethoven recordings than Schnabel, who is remembered as a great classicist. It reminds us once again that great artists can and should never be categorized. As much as Schnabel was a thinking pianist, he was after all a product of the 19^th century. In his playing, he was not a rigid tempo player. He was never hesitant to give the music breathing space, or shifting the tempo within a movement. For me, Schnabel’s music-making is closer to that of a Fürtwangler than a Toscinini.

Today’s musicians – not just pianists - can do worse than to consult and enjoy Schnabel’s Beethoven recordings. It is not so much a matter of imitating the way he played, but it is a glimpse, a looking back, into a different approach to art, and to music.

More than just a historical document, Schnabel’s recording of the Beethoven sonatas – from the opening upward “rocket” motive in the F Minor sonata to the ethereal final pages of the C Minor, Op. 111 - is part of our heritage as musicians, not to mention some of the most exalted and inspired music-making ever put on vinyl.

Schiff in Seattle

In an age where the arts celebrate the personality of the performer and the idea of performer-as-hero, rather than the music, it is reassuring to have someone like Andras Schiff who, in spite of his enormous talent, remains true to his art, and refuses to be seduced by the currents of commercialism so rampant in music today.

Last evening, Mr. Schiff graced the stage of Seattle’s Benaroya Hall at the invitation of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and performed J. S. Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations for a packed house and a very attentive audience (including one incredibly attentive seeing-eye dog in front of us.)

Like many others, I first encountered the Goldberg’s through Glenn Gould’s stunning debut recording on Columbia Records. For me, the impression that record made was so staggering that for a couple of decades, I find myself unable to listen to anyone else play the piece. But after hearing Mr. Schiff performing Book One of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier in Vancouver last year, I decided that I had to make the trek to Seattle to attend this performance.

Schiff plays the Goldberg Variations observing all the repeats. On top of the technical and musical challenges of which there are many, any artist playing the Goldberg must capture the attention of the audience for an unbroken 75 minute. From the first note of the Aria to the final notes of the reprise of the same Aria at the end, his playing certain captivated my attention. Mr. Schiff creates a beautiful sound at the piano, and he certainly employs all the resources of the modern instrument, while being faithful to Baroque performance practices, to create a colourful performance of this incredible work. As I remarked in my piece on Schiff’s performance of the Well Tempered Clavier last year, his playing is certainly markedly different from Gould’s more (deliberately) monochromatic interpretation – I cannot help associate the way Gould played with his fondness for black and white movies. Both approaches are equally valid, of course, and the contrast between the two artists – much like two equally great painters painting the same subject – is what makes Bach’s great work continually valid and moving centuries after they were written. Most importantly, Schiff, like Gould, was and is able to touch upon the spiritual dimension of these variations that is, of course, the core of the music.

At the end of Schiff’s performance, the audience (bless their hearts) remained silent until the very last sound died away and then, as one, stood up, cheering Bach, and the wonderful man who brought this great work alive for us.

After repeated curtain calls, Schiff returned and rewarded us generously, playing (“With the pedal,” he added) the entire Sonata in E Major, Op. 109 by Ludwig van Beethoven. He indicated that it is difficult to really play anything after the Goldberg’s, but thought this would be an appropriate work to play. I think I understood his thinking, that he wanted to play a work that is just as exalted and spiritually uplifting as the Goldberg Variations.

Schiff has, in recent years, been devoting his efforts to performing and recording the Beethoven sonatas. I have not heard his Beethoven interpretation before, but if last night’s performance of the Op. 109 was any indication, I believe his other Beethoven performance would be well worth our attention. It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Op. 109 ends with a set of theme and variations, with the theme returning at the end.

During the long drive home to Vancouver, I was filled with a sense of gratitude, for Bach, and for this humble and soft-spoken artist for bringing us Bach’s work that, in Glenn Gould’s words, “observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire’s lovers, ‘rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.’ It has, then unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency.”

After a performance such as last evening’s, the world, with all its problems, does not seem like such a gloomy place after all.

Young Orchestra

Whenever I feel gloomy about the state of the world, a sure antidote is to hear young musicians play great music. Such was the case last Saturday evening, when this year’s University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra made its debut concert under music director Jonathan Girard.  It was an exciting evening of great music played with great enthusiasm and polish.

The concert, featuring the music of Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, opened with Ravel’s beautiful Pavane pour une Infante Défunte. Ravel claimed to have chosen the title purely for its alliterative appeal – that there was no dead princess.

Although beautifully played (especially the haunting theme played by the French horn), I felt that the performance laced a sense of forward motion, perhaps as a result of the tempo chosen by the conductor. We should probably remember Ravel’s comment to Charles Oulmont, who played the Pavane for the composer too slowly: “Watch out, little one, it’s not a Pavane défunte pour une infant”, said the amused composer – it is not the Pavane that is dead!

Also on the programme was the same composer’s Ma mère l’oye, or Mother Goose. Both the Pavane and Ma mère l’oye exist in versions for orchestra and piano, but Ravel’s mastery as a composer was such that both works sound equally idiomatic and beautiful in both guises. Mr. Girard led the young musicians in a performance of great panache, combining the delicacy and sparkle the work demands.

Of greatest interest in the evening concert was perhaps the sole work after intermission – Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary Le Sacre du primtemps (The Rite of Spring). The work is celebrating its 100^th birthday this year, and orchestras all over the world are performing the piece to mark the occasion. To our 21^st century ear, accustomed to far greater dissonances and disorder in the music of the last century, Stravinsky’s watershed work sound positively tame today. This does not, however, take away any of the work’s originality and greatness. It is a piece that poses superhuman challenge to both individual players as well as the orchestra as an ensemble. It was indeed brave of Mr. Girard to have programmed the work in the first concert of year, with a new ensemble of relatively inexperienced young musicians.

As soon as the performance began with its now-famous bassoon solo, all my worries faded away. Mr. Girard, who clearly has a rapport with the young musicians, led them through this music with great confidence, at times almost reveling in the sound made by his players. There was never a moment that one worries about whether the players would “make it” through the many minefields scattered throughout the complex score.

During the well-deserved ovation following the performance, Mr. Girard raised the score in front of the audience, drawing our attention to this miraculous work and the genius that created it.

It was very touching to watch the young musicians as they played this music, with total dedication and commitment. For me, the concert certainly marks the beginning of a very good year for the UBC Symphony Orchestra.

I thank the young musicians for the hard work and their dedication, and eagerly await future performances by this talented ensemble.

Samson François

In recent years, record companies have been delving into their catalogues and issuing comprehensive editions of their artists’ recordings. Most extravagant among some of these releases has been Sony Music’s 144 CD’s Arthur Rubinstein Complete Album Collection (one day I will break my piggy bank to buy this). On a smaller scale, EMI have been releasing boxed sets of CD’s from their wonderful catalogue of great instrumentalists – Alfred Cortot, Yehudi Menuhin, Jacqueline du Pre, to name just a few. Recently a friend gave me a set of 8 CD’s, also from EMI, titled Les introuvables de Samson François. Listening to these CD’s - a real treasure trove of great performances - the last few weeks has given me immense pleasure, and I have been completely bowed over by Mr. François’ pianism and artistry.

Although much loved in his native France, Samson François (1924 – 1970) never really became a household word among music lovers in Germany, England, or North America. Before listening to this set of recordings, I had only known his legendary recording of the two Ravel concerti as well as the composer’s Gaspard de la nuit. I don’t know why I never bothered to look into his playing of works by other composers.

This present set of recordings presents a generous helping from the pianist’s discography, and gives music lovers a real taste of the playing of Samson François – concerti of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Prokofiev, and solo works of Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schumann, Bach, Frank, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bartok, and Fauré, as well as chamber works of Fauré and Frank. A pleasant surprise is part of a CD devoted to François’ own compositions. I believe that EMI has issued another set of recordings of the pianist’s playing of Chopin.

I have heard it said that today’s piano playing is either anonymous or idiosyncratic. Samson François’ playing, original as they were, fits into neither of these descriptions. I would have to say that the playing really is in a class of its own. In the concerto recordings, for example, I was particularly moved by his playing of the two Chopin concerti. I was surprised to learn that the pianist had recorded Prokofiev’s 3^rd as well as 5^th concerti. In his performance of Prokofiev’s 3^rd piano concerto, François brought out the lyricism of the music, without sacrificing any of its excitement. In the first movement, he took the initial scale runs at a tempo slower than many of today’s young keyboard titans, but allowed the music to gradually build to a climax. I would not want to live without Sviatoslav Richter’s scintillating account of the composer’s 5^th piano concerto, but François’ playing of this relatively neglected work is certainly on the same level, and just as exciting, as that of the great Soviet pianist. And I can think of no greater compliment than to say that François’ performances of the composer’s 7^th piano sonata, as well as the steely Toccata, Op. 11, could stand alongside performances by Vladimir Horowitz or Glenn Gould.

Perhaps Mr. François’ affinity for Prokofiev also rubbed off in his efforts as a composer. For me, it was interesting to hear in François’ own compositions, including a piano concerto, showing more than a passing influence from the Soviet composer.

This wonderful set of CD’s also contains a generous helping of the works of Robert Schumann, including an impregnable account of the rarely played, finger-breaking Toccata, Op. 7. The pianist’s performance of Papillons, Étude symphoniques, Carnaval, and Kinderszenen, shows him to have been a great Schumann player. I was particularly taken with conveying the spirit of the dance in Papillons as well as in parts of Carnaval. The word “ardent” keeps coming to mind when hearing François’ playing of Schumann.

Not surprisingly, Samson François’ playing of the chamber and solo works of Frank and Fauré were impeccably done, “to the manor born”, so to speak. His playing of Fauré had all the flexibility and subtlety that the works call for, qualities that elude many great musicians. His playing of Mendelssohn’s Andante and rondo capriccioso, as well as three of the Songs Without Words, had all of the elfin lightness that the works require. In two of Mozart’s solo piano works - Variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman” and the Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 282 - the playing was both stylish and beautiful. Unlike many pianists of his generation, François’ was not afraid to employ a large palate of colours in his playing of the composer’s music.

For me, the highlight of the entire set, the real find, had to be François’ performance of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp minor. The playing here was, for lack of a better description, simply stunning; extremely virtuosic, but without sacrificing the beauty of the sound. The pianist simply squeezed every ounce of expressiveness out of this hyper-emotional music, but remaining within the realm of good taste. In fact, what struck me listening in to all these recordings was how inspired and expressive the playing was. I find in these studio recordings the same excitement and spontaneity one usually only hears in live performances.

EMI has done a real service here in issuing these incredible recordings. Samson François was certainly not an “objective” pianist, pianists (mostly from the 20^th century) who would give no more and no less of what the composer had written. No, like his fellow countryman, Alfred Cortot, Samson François was an artist who was not afraid to read between and beyond the printed notes to discover and rediscover new meanings in the music.

In an age when the image (and often the wardrobe) of the musician looms larger than the message he or she has to deliver, the playing of Samson François reminds us of an age when being an artist, a musician, was not a “career” (a word that seems incongruous with art and music) but a calling.